ForgeRock, 2022 to 2023

Creating continuity through organizational change.

I joined ForgeRock to lead design systems and design operations. In October 2022, Thoma Bravo agreed to acquire ForgeRock, and it already owned Ping Identity. With the company’s future uncertain, my job became keeping the design team effective and preparing our products and practices for whatever integration came next.

My role: Principal Product Designer, Operations and Design Systems
Team: Two designers I led, and four engineers who built the system
Scope: Two Figma design systems for ForgeRock’s cloud products, and design operations

IG Studio route builder: an objects panel of handlers and filters, a canvas where a dispatch handler sends internal and external requests to different protection flows, and a properties panel. — IG Studio, one of the cloud products built on the system: a visual builder for identity gateway routes.

The challenge

ForgeRock ran two large Figma design systems across complex cloud products, alongside legacy experiences that still needed modernizing. The acquisition meant two companies’ products, and eventually their design systems, would have to come together.

Uncertainty like that can stall a team. Designers and engineers needed priorities that would hold up however the merger played out.

What I led

Three decisions kept the team focused and prepared the products for integration. I aligned priorities mainly with brand and engineering: getting the right brand assets to skin the products, and getting them built quickly.

I led two designers and ran design operations while the acquisition was underway. With the company’s future uncertain, I kept the team focused on what would hold up either way: adoption, and shared tokens and components that any merged product could build on.

Align design and engineering on one foundation

We worked with engineering on design tokens and component architecture, so libraries and production stayed consistent.

Drive adoption first

When I joined, product teams weren’t using the design system much. We got the product to about 85% built on it, so everything would look and behave the same if the company was absorbed by another.

Plan migrations, not rewrites

We defined interaction patterns and migration strategies to move legacy experiences onto the same tokens and components. If any part of the product needed to meld with Ping, it would be ready to reskin.

Try it: one product on the system

IG Studio was one of the products built on the system. I also contributed to its design. Choose where a request comes from and watch the path it takes: in IG Studio, this logic is visible on a canvas instead of buried in a configuration file.

The request comes from Inside the company Outside the company

Rebuilt for this case study from the original IG Studio design. It isn’t ForgeRock’s production code.

Forgerock UX Component Library

Component library

Documented components: 46
Library categories: 6

Collapse

Use to reveal supporting detail on demand. Triggers can be buttons or links mapped to the panel they open.

Triggers carry aria-expanded and aria-controls, and the state updates whenever a panel opens or closes.

Height animates at .35s, set in one Sass variable, and turns off for reduced motion.

The ForgeRock UX Component Library, rebuilt: 46 documented components across 6 categories, each built as a variant set in Figma and documented with usage, accessibility, and Sass guidance for engineering hand-off. The collapse component works.

Outcome

The system had a full set of base components, and the product was about 85% built on them. Because everything shared the same tokens and components, any part of it could be reskinned to meld with Ping. The acquisition closed after I left in March 2023.

~85%of the product built on the system

2Figma design systems

2designers led

4engineers building the system